The English Showcase

Name: Qiancheng Li

Title of presentation: Explicit Acquisition of Collocations Under Different Input Conditions for Chinese EFL Learners: Read Aloud or Silently

How could your topic be further developed? The study is going to explore non-native English speakers' incidental learnings of English collocation under different modes of reading. To conduct the study, an experiement in terms of different input will be done, so that participants in each experimental group will either read the text aloud or silently. 20 pseudo-collocations will be embedded in the text, 10 of them will appear once, while another 10 will appear 5 times. An immediate post-test will used to test participants's gains of the target collocations after reading. In the original presentation, the number of occurences of the target collocations were once, 5 times, 10 times and 15 times respectively in order to investigate the influence of frequency on learners' collocational gain. However, 10 times and 15 times are too many for the number of occurences that it will bring loads of work. Thus, the number of occurences will be changed. Also, the target paricipants haven't been articulated in the presentation.

To explore the effect of frequency on learners' collocational gains, 10 target items will appear in the text once, while the other 10 for 5 times. The target participants will be intermidiate learners. To select the participants, the author will use LexTale at the end of the test to measure their vocabulary. Also, to make sure the story could be understood by participants, the author will check the profile of it in Lexical Tutor and ensure most of the words are from the 2k families. Before the experiment, a pilot study will be conducted to ensure the post-tests are suitable for participants.

Name: Wenxiang Zhang

Title of presentation: A comparative analysis of Allianz's brand communication in social media from the UK to China

How could your topic be further developed? Sina Weibo has 511 million monthly active users in China (Sina Weibo, 2020), and Twitter has 18.4 million users in the UK (Matthew Woodward, 2023). To take advantage of such massive usage, nearly every brand has its own social media account and is trying their best to integrate social media in their digital strategies (Voorveld, 2019). Social media can not only attract users in the country where the brand is based, but it can also transcend geographical boundaries and assist multinational corporations in attracting customers who are located in various regions across the world and have diverse cultural backgrounds. Allianz, a global leader in insurance with headquarters in Germany, has subsidiaries in China and the United Kingdom, as well as social media accounts on Sina Weibo in China and Twitter in the UK. To achieve its brand communication goals, Allianz choose to post unique content on various social media platforms. This study compared how Allianz implemented its brand communication objectives and strategies on social platforms in the United Kingdom and China. In a manner similar to magazines, the content of social media posts will consist of two parts in order to provide rich information: written texts and images. Therefore, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) was applied in the present study to obtain a dimensional analysis of brand communication strategy Allianz used on social media.

The sample size of the study is insufficient，as Allianz would post millions of posts on various social media platforms in a range of countries. Therefore, Corpus-based discourse analysis is needed to quantitatively analyze the linguistic features of posts from Allianz. As a result, mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative method are desired to be applied for a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of brand communication strategies of Allianz.

Name: Carolien Wielockx

Title of presentation: Asylum Nurses in Fingersmith: Neo-Victorian Intersections of Class and Gender

How could your topic be further developed? My paper discussed the literary representation of asylum nurses in Fingersmith, Sarah Waters’ Neo-Victorian queer rewriting of the sensation novel, which looks at 19th century constructions of madness from a 20th century perspective. My view was that the asylum nurses in the novel are outcasts due to their marginal positions as women in a patriarchal society, with Nurse Bacon’s perpetual cruelty being grounded in class envy as well as her unknowable queerness – the term ‘queer’ being used here in both the original, broader sense of the word, as the narrower one referring to non-heteronormative gender as it is used today. I argued that it is Victorian women’s necessity to be ‘skilled in the art of disguise and performance’ that prompts the brutality of the nurses. These acts of violence include hitting about the face, punching in the stomach, throwing the women on the floor, shaking them violently, putting needles to scalps as well as using abusive language. Using a mix of frameworks such as historical materialism and feminist theories of Victorian literature, I illustrated how Waters self-consciously rewrites the hierarchies of both class and gender to account for the disturbing capacity of Fingersmith’s women nurses to hurt other women, and that in so doing the novelist queers not only the (love) story of protagonists Maud and Sue, but also that of Nurse Bacon. I pointed at the ways in which my research has opened up ideas for my own creative writing. In my work on Fingersmith, I hinted at a potential backstory for a woman character in a neo-Victorian novel. For my creative-critical dissertation I am working on a poetic reimagining of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), creating my own poetry informed by and analysed through the theoretical lens of adaptation and appropriation studies, neo-Victorianism, intertextuality, and women studies. I’m looking to investigate the process of writing poetry by doing a close reading of the way certain women characters in Dickens have been rewritten in Carey’s neo-Victorian novel, while using these literary-critical insights to create my own poetry. Presenting at the Showcase was a good exercise in communicating a 3000-word essay in ten minutes to an audience that is not necessarily familiar with my topic.

I’m particularly interested in exploring whether Genette’s view of the text as palimpsest might be a useful concept not just to critically analyse but also to create poetry. How do literary-critical concepts such as metafiction, appropriation, intertextuality not only guide the close reading of contemporary literary texts but also the creation? What forms do they push forward, if any? What does it mean to adapt and appropriate a text and what choices manifest themselves when creating poetry that writes back to both a Victorian and a neo-Victorian novel? Which principles govern the writing process of poetic adaptation: the narrative or the critical concepts applied to that narrative? What happens to the concept of adaptation if creativity is conceived of a reimagining of literary-critical concepts in their own right?

2023

2022

2021

2020

Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic no Showcase took place in 2020.

2019 

2018

2017

2016

2015

The English Showcase 2015 was the first of its kind for the School of English.

It was authoritative, consistently interesting, and full of enthusiasm. Speaking in public can be very difficult, and speaking about your work in front of peers and academic staff even more so, but the students handled that side of things with aplomb. Throughout, in fact, the Showcase felt like a professional academic conference – confirming the evident care with which it had been planned and structured. Well done!

 

- Dr Nathan Waddell, Assistant Professor of Literary Modernism, discussing the first English Showcase in 2015

 

Please see the video below to hear from some of the participants and organisers of the 2015 English Showcase.

Conference Booklet

The 2015 logo